Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/83

Rh differ from those of the modern trusts in the extent of their application; they will also be applied in a different way and for different objects. The new régime will effect the change with the view in the first place of raising the wages. The trust, on the contrary, proceeds regardless of the workers. Those who become superfluous are simply dismissed. They are at the most used in order to bring pressure on the remaining workers, to lower their wages and to increase their dependence. The victorious proletariat will, of course, proceed on totally different lines. It will transfer the workers who have become superfluous through some of the factories being closed, to others which will continue working. The trusts, on the other hand, rather tend to create unemployment, inasmuch as it is not their object to materially increase production. The more the mass of products is increased, the greater their supply, the lower, other things being equal, their price. But it is precisely the lowering of the price that the trusts aims at counteracting. Their tendency, therefore, is rather to restrict production than to increase it. If they carry on production only in the best of their undertakings, it is solely done with a view of reducing the cost of production, in order, thereby, to raise the profits—the prices remaining the same or even rising—and not with a view of extending production. The proletarian regime, on the contrary, is vitally concerned in the extension of production, since its aim is to raise not the profits but the wages. It will consequently increase the number of the workers in the best undertakings to the utmost, and will raise the production by such means as, for instance, shifts working one after the other. How this can be done, and to what an extent it can influence production, will be shown by an illustration, based on figures naturally arbitrary, yet not fanciful, and modelled after the actual working of the trusts. Let us take the German textile industry. It employs to-day about a million workers (in 1895—993,257). Of these the greater half (1895—587,599) are employed in factories, each counting more than 50 hands. We assume that the larger factory is also technically the most perfect. That, of course, does not always hold good in reality. A factory with 20 hands can be technically better organised than one in the same branch of industry with 80. But on the whole, it holds good, and we may assume it here the more readily, as we are dealing with an example for illustrative purposes, not with a positive proposal to be carried out the next day on the basis we lay down here. Let us assume that the most imperfect are those factories which employ less than 50 hands. All these would be closed, and their hands transferred to the factories employing more than 50. They could then be allowed to work alternately in two shifts. If a day's work amounts at present to 10 to 11 hours, the hours could' be reduced to eight hours for each shift. The factories would thus work daily six hours longer, their machinery would be made of far greater